Can you really refocus in post process?

I came a cross a very interesting little program, when updating what's on my USB darkroom. Its called Smart Deblur, and it promises the restoration of defocussed and blurred photo. Quite a claim! The example is quiet impressive, you can practise with the blur sliders on a deliberately out of focus image of text, which comes op as you start the software.

Ok how does it perform on real photos?. Just after the big storm on thursday last week I found myself in a taxi going over the Bolte bridge just as a double rainbow formed over the city. I grabbed my camera but i was taking the photo through a wet droplets covering the taxi window in rapidly darkening condition. The auto focus was tracking in and out, presumably confused by the contrast on the rain drops on the window. So I turned off the autofocus and had enough time to get two photos before a truck in the next lane blocked the view for long enough for the rainbow to fade, Damn! Trouble was my focus was not quiet right and/or the movement softened the detail too much. So I figured these where perfect images to test the deblur utility! With a fair bit of fiddling and a long wait or two I did get a serviceable improvement, albeit with more noise. which a little tweaking in lightroom calmed down. The results being better than I could achieve in lightroom alone, but in reality don’t expect magic.

Useful Camera Bag Extras

I am trying hard to keep the ancillary contents of my new Lowpro backpack to a minimum, to give extra room for cameras and lenses. Sounds easy but modern digital camera come with a range of extras, some vital others less so. This is a collection of things I always carry. Most importantly I have spare batteries. I also have a few spare SD cards, not a surprise. I have found keeping a small USB universal card reader very handy. I usually have two 4GB USB keys on hand, one blank the other has a number of photo oriented portable apps and utilities. which are great if the only computer around is a cyber cafe. One big hassle is always cables, you seldom need them but then they are always tangled. I found this mess bag with a zip is a great way to keep my contents tidy and generally tangle free. The other important item is a small portable backpack style hard drive, with a 500GB capacity to keep backups updated (each day). At the end of the month I archive from it and clean it up to start a fresh for the next month.

I have an HTC android phone, which has become not only a camera in its own right but also a very useful support accessory. In particular it is the GPS source when I wish to geotag my photos but it also has a number of useful photography oriented apps. It lives in my pocket.

Not shown is my laptop, which does live in the Lowpro backpack as well, and all the charges and power supplies which I don’t carry around in the backpack but fit in my case when I travel.

Travelling with a Sleepy Computer

I’m travelling at the moment (you should have noticed by now) and on my last night in the Auckland I shut down my computer and it stayed asleep for way too many days. I didn’t discover this until I’d reach Lake Taupo and no amount of button pressing and rebooting attempts got any response. So what do you do? When you are surrounding by such natural beauty and want to take hundreds of photos each day. You personally might not want to take so many but I was still keen too. So here are my strategies to stay on top of my photostream (ok photo river in flood). I have mentioned most of this travel stuff before but lessons hard learned are good lessons.

1) Use all available SD cards (I have two 4GB cards on 2 GB and 3 single GB cards). This is a really simple solution as SD cards are getting cheaper and have larger capacity so they a lot like purchasing more film. However not all the places I visit have SD cards for sale  so I always carry a few spares.

2) Switch over to taking mainly JPEG files rather than RAW. On my camera this reduces a typical landscape shoot from 14MB to 6MB (under half the size). The trade off here is quality, or so many “internet” experts would have you believe (I’ll do seperate post on this). Both HDRI Bracketing and multi-image panoramas force me to take lots of images but my software of choice for both techniques just use JPEG file in any case.

3) Use cyber cafes, to download, review and backup/archive your photos. Cyber cafes are getting very common at all the tourist destination, but they probably aren’t as fast and reliable as you might prefer (Uploading to flickr or even just looking at your flickr stream will probably involve many tedious time outs and lost uploads.) Yet most computers will have a USB port so I can attach my cheap portable cards reader (which worked like a charm) to upload my photos to the computer (temporarily), If I have time I can also one or more of my stable of favorite post-processing software on my portable apps USB key

3.1) Autostitch is the multi-image stitcher of choice and is a big bonus that I can run it off my memory key. It only handles JPEG files and can be slow and memory intensive for big output files so I just use it to preview the stitching on the road.

3.2) Picturenaut has become my default HDRI tool the fact that I can run it off my USB is a big bonus. It only works with JPEG files

3.3) Noiseworks is a bit luxury but if I have to take photos in lowlight with Higher ASA I know I will need to do some noise cleanup.

3.4) If the cyber café computers don’t have Picasa or Microsoft Photo Gallery (many do) I find  XNView Portable, a fast and reliable photo viewer and manager that can handle RAW format images.

I always carry a little seagate free agent USB Backpack style hard dick(its getting on now but it does have a handy 120 GB of storage) and I use this routinely as my working backup/archive for my photos as I travel. Its only downfall is it need two USB cables, one just for power and some special drivers. Whilst most cyber café computers will let it load and connect a few don’t seem to set up the right drivers and was a bit flakey on some file copies (I never lost any files but….) However this mean I was able to confidently remove my photos from my SD cards every third of forth day.

The slow internet speeds here in New Zealand & bandwidth issues means I have avoided on-line storage like Sky drive, flickr or picasa web.

Don’t forget to empty the recycle bin on any public computer after you have deleted your images. This ensure that your precious photos are not “found” (aka Stolen) by other at the cyber cafe

So taking my own advice a little bit of preparation (extra SD cards, my PortableApps USB key with a few key programs, Card Reader and Backpack Drive) I was able to avoid undue stress and I could carry on taking photos just as I wanted too.

I eventually managed to “wake up” my computer with a cheap set of jeweler’s screw drivers and carefully removing both the rechargeable battery, backup battery & hard disks and equally as carefully replacing them.

All things Pentax

When I was reviewing Windows Live Photo I was referred to this site in a search for some extra Codec files. Having a look around I found it is a nice one stop place for Pentax owners giving links to all the latest firmware updates, software , drivers and manuals.

If you haven’t already found your camera manual in PDF format. I strong suggest you do so now (look for a CD that came with your camera first or just google the word manual followed by your camera model) and then copy it to the USB key that you keep in your camera bag.

You don’t keep a USB memory key in your camera bag? Then read this.

Travelling Stuff

To say I travel a lot, is an understatement! I am well over the implied romance of flying and I particularly zone out through the airport ordeal. With security now beefed up it is time to slim down the stuff inside my camera bag, which I always hand carry on flights. I haven’t got enough trust established to let anything breakable go into checked in baggage. I also always hand carry my laptop computer. None of this seems to come under special scrutiny from the Security X-ray team.

So what to I like to carry?  As little as possible. Extra memory cards, SD cards are getting cheaper and are the best way to give yourself extra capacity. Don’t be afraid to buy extra cards along the way (but they will be overpriced in those duty free shops). Next I have a simple USB memory card reader. I have an SD card reader built into my laptop, but not many cyber cafes do. I can also easily transfer stuff to clients computers via this card reader. This has saved my bacon many times. Next I have my phone and a cable to connect it to my computer, and still use it occasionally as a GPRS modem (this is painfully slow but works reliably). I also have a Next-G modem (not shown, because it lives with my laptop) with which I have a love/hate relationship (its broadband and fast but annoyingly flaky).
The gem in this collection is the USB key. It is loaded with camera friendly Portable Apps, an open source open platform that allows programs to be run from a USB key, without requiring anything in the registry or to be installed on the host computer. Here are a collection of utilities I like to travel with and have used a lot.

• Autostitch (*), my favorite panorama stitching program.
• Cornice Portable, is an image viewer has thumbnail previews, full screen modes, rotation, slideshow modes and EXIF support.
• Exif Reader (*), is a small freeware utility that extracts image information from EXIF/JPG files.
• JpegView Portable, is still an unsupported test version, is a small and fast on the fly viewer/editor.
• GIMP Portable, is the popular open source image editor packaged. Has lots of features but comes with a longer learning curve. It has a massive fan base and good on-line Tutorials & Forums.
• Mosaic Creator (*), this is a wonderful collection of photo mosaic tools. I use this for my photo impressions.
• Noiseware (*), is a really good digital/heat noise remover.
• Photormin, a really simple image editor for fast resizing, basic retouching, and cropping. Probably I will replace this with JpegView before long, but still like its speed.
• Picturenaut (*), if you don't have version 3.0 download it now, this a very easy to use HDRi tool and does a beautiful job without lots of tweaking. 
• XnViewPortable, to be honest I’d rather used picasa, but in a pinch this is a very competent photo simple editor/ photo  manager/ viewer/ converter that can even be used in a cyber cafes. There is a decent community of  XnView fans out there and the on-line forum is a great place to get assistance.

(*) These are not a specific Portable Apps versions just the freeware/ shareware /demo versions that runs perfectly from the USB key. To install them on the USB Key simple copy the installed software directory into the PortableApps directory on the USB key.

A new acquisition to the kit bag is a Sony Walkman Series B USB MP3 player. It is the size of a normal USB key but it is primarily an MP3 audio player, but unlike my IPod nano it receives FM radio and it is a one button to press Voice recorder. My Olympus software bundled with my older CX4000 incorporated support for sound commentary on each photo and at the time I though what a waste of space. Now I’m changing my mind, I have found having an easy to use dictaphone that can hang around your neck is very useful when your hands are full of camera. Music & Podcasts sound pretty good on it as well. I also now have all my camera manuals stored on it.  Something indespensiable when you are out the back of nowhere. It is labbelled 2GB but I have found there is only about 1.7GB of usable space left for other things. Still that is plenty of space for all sorts of stuff not only music, and I prefer to keep it only half full incase I have a lot to say. One downside is that Photo Kiosks don’t seem to be able to read it. So I don’t recomend it as your only transfer key or for the PortableApps.

At Last

I have become a massive fan of PortableApps, which is a Open Source, Open Platform, that allows you to run applications from a USB key without having to install them on the computer, alter registry, clutter your screen with icon, slow down start up and consume disk space. I have found having both my favourites and also some only occasionally used photo utilities on a USB key in my camera bag particularly useful.

The one program I really missed was Picasa which has become my favoured photo manager. So I was excited to see a way to use Picasa with/within PortableApps, discussed in the PortableApps Forum

Picasa within PortableApps

Ok to be honest this is a bit complex. What is available now is not a distribution of Picasa for PortableApps, but a Launcher Utility that will transfer an installed copy of Picasa from your PC to a USB key. Once there it can be used from the USB Key on any computer. The problem lies in the licensing of the Picasa distribution.

Before you start you must download and install Picasa from the google site, its free, and will be a good idea to make sure you check for any updates. Then run the Picasa Loader from the PortableApps menu. This first time you run it, you will be prompted by a special wizard that transfer Picasa and installs it to your USB device.

A really big limitation of this version of the launcher, is that photo folder paths and settings aren’t kept when moving from machine to machine. I’m sure that will be addressed in future release. However don’t despair, now you have the warm feeling of being able to view & manage your photos in the same way as you travel. If you use Picasa regularly all this is worth the effort. Just remember to copy any photos you are working on somewhere safe, like the USBkey. At 34mb it does consume a fair bit of USB key capacity.

XnView Portable

At the same time I found Picassa portable loader I also noticed that XNView has become a standard portable application. Having heard some good things about the XNView freeware version  I decide to try it, and perhaps compare it to Picasa. Ok It is not Picasa, or even a close substitute but it is a damn fine program, way better than Cornice Portable which I had been using as my photo view/manger on the key previously. It reminds me a lot of the program ThumbsPlus. It can read and write hundreds of graphic formats include most RAW formats and specifically DNG. It can carryout all the basic editing and enhancing tasks, has very clean interface, does the viewing and managing of photos simply and easily. A tiny complaint is the thumbnails are a bit smaller than I would like. So my conclusion is that as a photo manager on a USB drive in your camera bag it is ideal. Importantly it will be less hassle to set up than Picasa, and installs to only 18mb.